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People seemed to like the first one, before it sunk like a rock from lack of contributions. So, again...with feeling this time! Throw your wild-ass nerdy speculations in here with abandon! Same rules as before: try to stick to mostly known physics, with allowances for increased efficiency. You want to invent iffy nonsense like warp drives, you might as well be arguing about Tolkien.
Last time around, somebody remarked that rail guns/mass drivers are overengineered in space; due to the speed at which craft are traveling, an object moving at much lower speed would be just as lethal. On reflection, I disagree. Two spacecraft in battle are highly unlikely to be rocketing towards each other at a high rate of speed. Space isn't jousting. Furthermore, sans "inertial damping," achieving high speeds in battle is difficult, counterproductive and dangerous. You won't have time to achieve it without killing the crew, you won't be able to change it from a predictable straight line without killing the crew, you basically can't do a damned thing without killing the crew. So forget it. Any spaceship in battle is likely to be going at more reasonable speeds.
Given that it's possible to go much faster than humans can tolerate already, that AI is likely to be much more sophisticated and cost-effective in the future, and that a hit from a mass-driver slug is somewhat akin to being punched in the face by God, space combat is going to be very dangerous. The only way to last more than a few seconds once the battle starts is by way of vigorous active defenses: laser interception systems, AEGIS-type missiles and automated defense drones. The ship can't possibly move fast enough to evade attack, and no conceivable armor could stand up to a hunk of metal moving at something like a hundred miles per second ("shields" are not presently possible or even theoretically conceivable, are they?). Missile-wise, there's no reason not to use H-bombs in space. Therefore it must have things around it that can move and react a hell of a lot faster than it can, no? Correct me if I'm wrong.
Now, about weapons: I'm obsessed with mass-drivers for a reason. Lasers are cool and all, but I understand that ablative armor is quite effective even with minimal thickness. Come to think of it, maybe you could have ablative-armored driver shells to make defensive lasers perfectly useless. That's a pleasant thought! Anyway, once you're moving around a big honking space ship, you might as well protect your investment with about a foot and a half of vaporizing protection. At which point, to hell with lasers.
Missiles are another possibility, but they can be intercepted more easily than shells, they take up more space, and their guided-ness isn't likely to come into play as much in the relative emptiness of space. You want something compact and hella fast. Missiles are for when you've just sighted the enemy at extreme distance, you aren't sure he's sighted you and you don't want to give away your position. The missiles are also necessary at that distance for purposes of accuracy; very small vibrations in the ship will cause huge errors over distance.
If that fails and the two of you get down to business, you power up the big gun and start whaling. Of course I say "big gun" and not "big guns" because there's a problem with recoil, and in slippery space a little recoil goes a long way. I think you'd want a gun located in line with the central axis of the ship, so you can compensate effectively using pulses from the engine. Plus such a gun could run much deeper and thus shoot much faster by using more magnets in a row (I'm assuming a Gauss-cannon type design).
Sudden thought: there's absolutely nothing keeping you from storing missiles outside the ship proper, except that maybe launching them would impart a tiny but annoying amount of spin to the ship, unless they were launched symmetrically. Also, several parallel mass drivers might have some merit in terms of faking out defensive systems. Okay, this post is ginormous enough.
Last time around, somebody remarked that rail guns/mass drivers are overengineered in space; due to the speed at which craft are traveling, an object moving at much lower speed would be just as lethal. On reflection, I disagree. Two spacecraft in battle are highly unlikely to be rocketing towards each other at a high rate of speed. Space isn't jousting. Furthermore, sans "inertial damping," achieving high speeds in battle is difficult, counterproductive and dangerous. You won't have time to achieve it without killing the crew, you won't be able to change it from a predictable straight line without killing the crew, you basically can't do a damned thing without killing the crew. So forget it. Any spaceship in battle is likely to be going at more reasonable speeds.
Given that it's possible to go much faster than humans can tolerate already, that AI is likely to be much more sophisticated and cost-effective in the future, and that a hit from a mass-driver slug is somewhat akin to being punched in the face by God, space combat is going to be very dangerous. The only way to last more than a few seconds once the battle starts is by way of vigorous active defenses: laser interception systems, AEGIS-type missiles and automated defense drones. The ship can't possibly move fast enough to evade attack, and no conceivable armor could stand up to a hunk of metal moving at something like a hundred miles per second ("shields" are not presently possible or even theoretically conceivable, are they?). Missile-wise, there's no reason not to use H-bombs in space. Therefore it must have things around it that can move and react a hell of a lot faster than it can, no? Correct me if I'm wrong.
Now, about weapons: I'm obsessed with mass-drivers for a reason. Lasers are cool and all, but I understand that ablative armor is quite effective even with minimal thickness. Come to think of it, maybe you could have ablative-armored driver shells to make defensive lasers perfectly useless. That's a pleasant thought! Anyway, once you're moving around a big honking space ship, you might as well protect your investment with about a foot and a half of vaporizing protection. At which point, to hell with lasers.
Missiles are another possibility, but they can be intercepted more easily than shells, they take up more space, and their guided-ness isn't likely to come into play as much in the relative emptiness of space. You want something compact and hella fast. Missiles are for when you've just sighted the enemy at extreme distance, you aren't sure he's sighted you and you don't want to give away your position. The missiles are also necessary at that distance for purposes of accuracy; very small vibrations in the ship will cause huge errors over distance.
If that fails and the two of you get down to business, you power up the big gun and start whaling. Of course I say "big gun" and not "big guns" because there's a problem with recoil, and in slippery space a little recoil goes a long way. I think you'd want a gun located in line with the central axis of the ship, so you can compensate effectively using pulses from the engine. Plus such a gun could run much deeper and thus shoot much faster by using more magnets in a row (I'm assuming a Gauss-cannon type design).
Sudden thought: there's absolutely nothing keeping you from storing missiles outside the ship proper, except that maybe launching them would impart a tiny but annoying amount of spin to the ship, unless they were launched symmetrically. Also, several parallel mass drivers might have some merit in terms of faking out defensive systems. Okay, this post is ginormous enough.
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I'm not sure why I didn't participate more in that thread. Maybe I was just too entranced by my then-GF's presence or something.
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